Didn't finish

By aaron.axvig, Sat, 10/02/2021 - 12:18

I picked this book out at the library as the one to read to complete my goal of reading a book during my four weeks off between jobs.  I wandered the shelves looking for books that looked like sci-fi (somehow it seems like one can pick them out pretty easily by the title, font, and imagery on the spine...I can't quite explain it) and found this one, and was pleasantly surprised to see that it won Hugo and Nebula awards.  Should be a good one!

Unfortunately I did not enjoy it and stopped in the middle of chapter six.  This is where you final get the reveal that the book is about old gods versus new gods.  I had been dragging myself through the book up to hear and at this point I realized it was not going to be interesting.  As a final check I read the plot summary on Wikipedia and even that was boring.

Learning about the House on the Rocks in Wisconsin was very interesting, and I plan to try to find a list of other interesting locations like that which are mentioned in the book.  IIRC the intro alluded to people doing road trips tracing the characters' travels so there must be a few other good destinations.

The version I had was the one with annotations by Leslie S. Klinger.  I did enjoy the presence of the annotations even though they slowed down my pace of reading, and would readily read another annotated book.

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By aaron.axvig, Tue, 04/07/2020 - 17:48

I read about half of this book a week or two ago.  Today I picked it up to finish it and only got a few paragraphs in.

The lack of punctuation absolutely kills me.  Most egregious is no quotation marks to show when someone is talking.  But there are plenty of other liberties taken and frankly I just don't like that.

The stories themselves are good enough that I would finish the book if it was normally written.  Reading about "hard" lives isn't exactly of strong interest to me, and at two weeks past reading them I don't really remember anything else about them.

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By aaron.axvig, Wed, 03/25/2020 - 10:41

I tried to play this for about an hour but I just couldn't figure it out (on mobile).  It is like a joke to control this kind of game with a touchscreen, and that was a sufficient obstacle to figuring out how to build a house that I just gave up.

Maybe five years ago I played Terraria some on PC, maybe 10 hours?  From memory I would rate it OK.  Not sure why I expected it to be better on mobile.  I guess I should try with a controller of some sort.

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By aaron.axvig, Wed, 03/18/2020 - 13:39

Fairly interesting book about the Rothschilds family.  I'm writing this up maybe six months after I stopped reading it, and I made it about 2/3 of the way through.  I guess now I know that there was a father and five sons, they were into banking, had a lot of nice houses/castles, etc.  To many names to remember though!

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By aaron.axvig, Wed, 02/19/2020 - 21:30

The writings compiled in this book do an excellent job at describing the mostly negative impacts that WWII had on its contributors, certainly making me feel like I have it pretty easy (I do!).  It did get pretty repetitive and is not what I would describe as a page turner past about halfway.  I closed it up with about 20 pages left to go, not that it was bad but just that I didn't feel that I had anything to gain by reading the last 20 pages (nor the previous 50-100 pages).

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By aaron.axvig, Sun, 02/09/2020 - 15:21

I found this game on the No Bullshit Games page, which lists games that don't have IAPs or ads.  So generally they cost a couple bucks, and I believe this one did.

I really like the mechanics of this game.  Little agents move around your system of facilities automatically performing tasks.  It reminds me of the World/Kingdom of Keflings which I played nigh on a decade ago.  Setting up automated systems like this is one of my favorite game mechanics.

I don't like that the campaign levels are so short.  It seems like I could get more enjoyment out of the effort I put into setting everything up.  Actually these short levels would be OK for a few tutorial levels, maybe even 10 learning levels.  But it keeps going, and with seemingly random new things mixed in.  I have passed level 27 in the campaign and it keeps throwing in new concepts that are only used for one or two levels.  By now I am maybe four hours into the game and I am tired of learning one-off things.

It would help a lot of the buildings and/or resources were intuitively named.  Gumballs are made in a laboratory?  How am I supposed to remember that?  Maybe it should be called...a gumball factory!

At this point I don't really feel like completing the campaign.

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By aaron.axvig, Tue, 08/27/2019 - 03:00

Very irritating dialog for the main character. For example, "we had miles t'make, no surplus of daylight t'do it in." Apostrophes everywhere...it may be a small issue but this was my main issue with the book.

I did not find the plot that interesting, and also a little hard to follow. So I gave up about 2/3 of the way in. There are better books waiting for me.

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